Birth Visionaries: an Examination of Unassisted Childbirth

Birth Visionaries: An Examination of Unassisted Childbirth Author: Lauren Ashley Brown Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/722 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2009 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Sociology BIRTH VISIONARIES: AN EXAMINATION OF UNASSISTED CHILDBIRTH a thesis by LAUREN ASHLEY BROWN submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts August 2009 © copyright by LAUREN ASHLEY BROWN 2009 Birth Visionaries: An Examination of Unassisted Childbirth By Lauren Ashley Brown Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber, Thesis Chair This exploratory study inquires into unassisted childbirth, the act of giving birth without the presence of any birth professional (doctor, midwife or doula). Unassisted birth is on the radical fringe of alternatives to the dominant techno-medical birth common in American hospitals today. My research questions are what are women’s motivations for choosing unassisted childbirth and what is the lived experience of unassisted childbirth? I will answer these questions through nine in-depth interviews and a grounded theory data analysis. My approach comes from a focus on the everyday lived experience of women as problematic as well as insights from anthropology of birth and feminist postmodern sociology of knowledge. This study is relevant to public health policy on pregnancy and birth, to those working on questions of technology and culture, and to those concerned with how biosocial rituals shape embodied experience. My findings also contribute to research about power in contemporary society, specifically how the body can be a cite for social control and resistance. 1 Introduction “I said something to her like ‘come on out baby it’s okay’ or something like that, and it was like I was just connected to her, I wasn’t having to worry about anybody else, you know we had the lights dimmed, and it was just us, it was the most beautiful, beautiful experience of my life, and everything was calm and it was the way it should have been. We welcomed her into our family in the most peaceful and beautiful environment that we could have. And everything just happened, you know your body knows what to do, and not having to divide your attention between what your body is supposed to be doing and other people who are there, I was able to really see where that labor and delivery process took us, and that was just a beautiful experience”.- Kara’s description of the unassisted birth of her daughter Avery This quote paints a different picture of birth than our common cultural vision of a woman lying in a hospital bed screaming in fear and pain, cursing at her husband and praying for the doctor to get the baby out. Kara was one of the nine women I interviewed who made the choice to have unassisted childbirth. Unassisted childbirth is planned childbirth without the presence of a birth professional such as a midwife, doctor, or doula. In America today 99% of women give birth in a hospital, of the 1% who do not, some give birth in a freestanding birth center, some at home with a midwife, and some at home unassisted (Block, 2007: xx). Previous research has shown that there is a demand for alternatives to the dominant medical model of childbirth. The natural birth movement that developed out of the 1960s has grown to be even more important as the American way of doing birth has grown increasingly technical and medical. Recent statistics, such as the fact that 30.2% of American women give birth by cesarean section, are raising questions about the safety and effectiveness of our normative way of doing birth (Block, 2007: xx). There are a number public health experts, social scientists, doctors, midwives, doulas, childbirth advocates and mothers who remain highly critical of the technological medical model of birth today; however, these critics remain a minority. The medical 2 model of childbirth has been made to seem like the natural order of things through social hegemony and institutionalized into medical policy and the law, creating a culture of birth where women have few choices outside of the medicalized hospital model. Women who birth unassisted are as far from the common medical model that you could get, they represent the extreme rejection of the normative way of giving birth in America. Researchers from the field of anthropology of birth argue that birth is a cultural event shaped largely by social norms. These works importantly investigate how American culture shapes the way women experience pregnancy and birth and what our birth ways reflect about underlying cultural beliefs. While some work has focused on women who reject the medical model and birth with midwives, no empirical study has been done on women who choose to birth unassisted. The purpose of this project is to research why women chose unassisted birth and what is the lived experience of unassisted birth? Through the lens of these women’s experiences, the hegemonic way of doing birth in America is made problematic. What lies beneath it is a complex web of epistemological assumptions of the dominant culture in the Northwest. For thinkers who are committed to the social construction of reality, there is growing movement to move beyond the work of deconstructing the constructions and begin creating new ways of being that challenge oppressive hegemonic norms (S. Pfohl 2008, B. Hooks 1992). Women who have unassisted childbirth are doing exactly that. These women’s experiences subvert many of our “taken-for-granted” notions of the female body, nature, medicine, technology, and of the dominant structure of our ways of being, believing, and knowing. This exploration of UC pushes the limits of what is 3 possible and impossible in birth (and life). The stories of my interviewees provide not only critical deconstruction of birth hegemony, but they serve to open conceptual space for discourses of marginalized knowledge. In directly challenging what they have experienced as an oppressive culture of birth, these women’s subversive and empowered subjectivities as UC mothers also provide us with a way to understand modern operations of power and resistance. Theoretical Literature In the last couple of decades there has been an increase of interdisciplinary interest in women and the body. Michel Foucault contributed extensively to this work with his theories of modern power and the body. Foucault’s argued that social order is maintained in the institutions of contemporary society not through corporeal punishment, but through the constant possibility of surveillance. This kind of control is internalized and functions to constantly discipline behavior as people seek to conform to the normative order to avoid social repercussions (1977). The normative order is exercised through epistemes and discourses found in what counts as knowledge. The embodiment of these epistemes set the limits of reality expressed in subjectivity, the way a person relates to their inner self and in their physical embodiment. Foucault argued that this power largely operates through disciplining the body, a discipline that literally invades the body to control its functions and movements. The body was “entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it.” This machinery of power sought to produce “subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies”(1977: 138). 4 Foucault’s conception of power operates not as a unidirectional force, but through social relations and the reproduction of norms, attitudes, and trends. Power is a span of relational forces that operate via “a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies” to determine which aspects of knowledge and experience are validated as authoritative (Foucault 1977: 100). Power is then intimately connected to knowledge and played out in the discourse of daily life. The discursive and socially constructed nature of this power allows for the possibility of resistance. Resistance and freedom are made possible through the deconstruction of hegemonic epistemologies and the reconstruction of new liberated subjects. While Foucault’s theory of power has been useful to work on women and the body, Foucault is criticized for leaving out the specific disciplined embodiment of women. Feminist scholars argue that our society creates gendered bodies and that the particular powerlessness of women’s embodied experience must be brought out of the silence. Dorothy Smith’s heritage of women’s everyday lived experience as problematic brings listening to women’s voices to the center (1987). Feminist scholarship links women’s embodied experiences with practices of power, particularly noting the importance of the body as a source of control (Bordo, 1993, Daly, 1990, Hesse-Biber, 2007, Harding, 1991). Studies have focused on a wide range of women’s experiences with the body spanning topics such as body image, sexuality, menstruation, aging, pregnancy and birth. Feminists have called for social theory of the body that looks at how women experience their body with an eye on gender and power, paying attention to how 5 institutions and discourse shape embodied experiences. The female body is investigated not only as a passive object of domination and control, but as an agentic site of resistance. The medical institution and its discourse has been a long-standing focus for examining how power functions through women’s experiences of the body. The medical establishment as a whole is criticized for it’s ‘clinical gaze’ which gives doctors the power to define what is natural and healthy, acting as a major form of social control (Foucault, 1973). Jackie Orr adds to this argument that the current medical establishment has created a hegemonic “corporate-techno-medical” discourse (1993).

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